Wireless local area networks are becoming more commonplace as the use of portable computers, such as “laptop,” “notebook,” and “pen” computers become increasingly common in office environments and other locations. In most conventional wireless local area networks, a number of access point base stations (or access point stations as sometimes referred) form a cellular network for communicating with wireless mobile stations or other mobile devices. Each access point station is typically connected to a network server, such as part of an ethernet or other network infrastructure. Any messages transmitted as wireless communication signals are first transmitted to an access point station instead of transmitted along wireless stations. This type of centralized wireless communication using cells provides control over communications along existing wireless mobile devices. Typically, the wireless communication signals are a spread spectrum communications signal, for example, a direct sequence spread spectrum signal, or a frequency hopping spread spectrum signal.
Although wireless local area networks are becoming more commonplace in offices and similar environments, most wireless local area networks have fixed location access point stations that are positioned at the fixed and known location and used by a plurality of mobile devices that operate with and connect to the wireless local area network system through the access point station. There are times when it may be advantageous to use a mobile access point station to extend the area of the wireless local area network or provide greater coverage in a specific area. Other reasons for using a mobile access point station are known and could be suggested to those skilled in the art.
Most prior art wireless local area networks do not provide the capability of incorporating a mobile access point station into the network because the wireless local area network has no location and processing capability to determine the location of an access point station operating in the wireless LAN environment. Although some wireless LAN systems provide for signal strength analysis of spread spectrum signals to determine location of mobile devices, none of them provide any accurate location determination system of a mobile access point station that would be operative within the wireless infrastructure defined by other access point stations.